Ambiance

Throughout my life, my energy has come from trees and sky, stars and open ocean expanses iced with wind gusts and sailboats bobbing on top of the water. Half of my life has been comprised of weekends chopping firewood for our wood burning stove, summer evenings inhaling the scent of cut grass off the freshly trimmed lawn or riding my bike through walls of humidity while listening to the crickets and summer peeps, skidding to a stop on the dirt lane. The crab apple tree in the center of my yard contains a stump in the middle where I would sit and write in my journal lofted above the yard while Friskey would lie out on a branch nearby. Even within these moments, I knew I was actually painted on a page of a storybook.

When I needed to think, finding myself in an empty kitchen after school, I would head to the woods and journey through the dead leaves and moss covered ground, trekking down to the swamp below my house or through the backwoods down my lane. In the winter time, parts of the swamp would freeze over, solidifying curvy narrow ice paths where my brother and I could slide. Runs to White Lake or down Slabtown Creek Road beneath shadowy tree trunks bursting with color characterized all seasons, the winter appearing in grayscale. With my first decent camera, I would take pictures of the sunset or photograph the tree tops for hours, the hard copy pictures now slowly bending in crates in my basement.

The silence slows steps and escorts you carefully into the quiet of the woods. They are very much alive, yet largely still. The trees continue to grow soundlessly; micro-organisms in the ground crunch with their mouths closed and only the occasional squirrel or bird making a swift move up the trees or over to neighboring branches can be heard. Alone on a hilltop or farmland edge I would sit and wait for some kind of miracle or inspiration to come, to write something genius in my journal while following the moving clouds with my eyes.

Fresh air rarely filters through this new metropolitan realm. Silence is elusive, found only within my apartment and sometimes creeping along darkened sidewalks or tiny side streets. I try to walk with it, but it runs away to lock itself away for me when I get home. People inhabit every corner surrounding me, carrying conversations, walking hand in hand, moving in vehicles or peddling bicycles. Grassy park commons and fountains painting rainbows in the air outline the city with nature, which I relish. Food and clothing come packaged in tasty styles and decorative wrappings, trimmed with articulate architecture and ancient materials. The city is a fabric of pockets which have been stitched together to form neighborhoods and districts, galleries of the wealthy and poor, laid out among towering structures that climb into the sky, exhaling their innovations and economy throughout the country.

From my bedroom window, the mountains watch me from a distance as I eye the orange sun setting itself along their backbone. Once gone, the moon comes through the black canopy, with a few starry escorts, brightly shining.

To compare the two just wouldn’t be fair.